Health Care Delivery

With April as National Autism Awareness Month, it’s a good time to recalibrate where we are when it comes to the diagnosis and treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

While there is much to celebrate, there is also a reminder for continued vigilance: children receiving Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) services achieve better outcomes with fewer hours of intervention, but its use is still well below the ASD prevalence rate.

Beacon Health Options’ new Oakland, CA office sits literally and figuratively at the intersection of health care and technology.

To one side of our building stands Kaiser’s corporate headquarters. To the other side stand towers occupied by San Francisco’s spreading tech boom, including Uber’s new office. It’s a fitting metaphor for where Beacon stands as well – at a point of transition to a world where technology is an essential enabler of services.

I was doing some Google searching on the best way to find a doctor, trying to put myself in the shoes of a member who might be looking for services, and one of the articles that popped up struck such a chord that I had to put pen to paper.

Many corporations have corporate values. Most corporations list their corporate values on their websites. Great corporations are those that manage to back up their words with actions. MEANINGFUL actions. David Beigie, Vice President of Public Affairs for State Farm, writes about this issue in a recent blog post. In this very brief post, Mr. Beigie challenges the reader to think about corporate values differently. Employees need more than a PowerPoint and a post-test to successfully operationalize corporate values. We need connection with one another and with those we serve to validate whether we are doing what we say we do. During my first few weeks as a part-time employee, I was struck by how often I observed each of the…

When it comes to solving health care delivery problems, who would think of the postal service as a potential source of solutions? Yet, a pilot program in Jersey, an island between France and England, has shown that this entrenched institution offered a creative way to provide care to a group of people who are among the most difficult to reach – the frail elderly. Although the pilot didn’t seek to provide a substitute for health and social care professionals, this group did exhibit some territorial defensiveness, with little active participation by incumbent providers. From 2010 to 2040, the number of islanders over 65 in Jersey is predicted to double. However, Jersey’s health system suffers from outdated models of health…